USA First Lady Michelle OBAMA is Out Of Control

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12652

I found his article while searching for information on Government Spending and wanted to share it with you.

I think we all can be appalled at the subject of this article. I had heard of this condition some months back, but thought the information was wrong. I see now that it is quite true.

We need to send a strong message to the White House that the people who are paying for this extravagance are struggling to just have food to eat and money to pay monthly bills. No vacations and no added luxuries. Is this an example of what's to come?

We can change this country. Vote everyone who is a career politician out in 2010 and 2012 beginning with Congress and House of Representatives. It's never too late to vote for conservative change. We would be better off with 525 people who know nothing about running the government than the clowns we gave our trust to.  Do you feel like you are being let down....I do. 

It's time for some hope and faith

It's time for some hope and faith in America...and it is going to begin with me.

Hope is the belief in a positive outcome without evidence to support that belief. It is also one the three gifts from God and includes Love, Hope and Faith. I was always eternally hopeful. I looked for the bright side, found the silver linings and routinely brought people out of depression. I smiled when there was no reason to do so. I pumped people up in the face of advesity.

Somewhere along the line, I lost some of that feeling of hope. Maybe life's many lessons made me more cynical. It can happen as time goes by. Things go bad and you learn lessons...sometimes more then once and some less painful than others. As wisdom increases, you begin to pedict outcomes with greater and greater accuracy. Case in point:  My son. I am always letting my son know the benefit of my wisdom...often whether he wants my counsel or not. But what happened to my eternal feeling of hope? Has it been replaced by negativeism? Do people really want to be told the possible down side of future events? I think deep down the answer is a resounding NO. People surround themselves with positive people. Right or wrong, it makes them feel good. My goal is to restore my hope.   

I have come to know that only God can restore hope. When you give all your fears over to God, it is immediately replaced by hope. Through faith...honest faith...you have the one true place for those fears to be released. Once you hand them over to God, fears fade away and do not occupy your mind anymore...the Holy Spirit does. Hope does.

You might agree with this definition, but I think "wisdom" is the ability to predict possible outcomes based on related and unrelated information and conditions at hand. Life's lessons can certainly add wisdom for those who learn something from the lesson.

The Bible is full of lessons. The depth of those lessons is a subject for etermal pursuit and understanding. One lesson is that through faith, your problems are far smaller than God's power. I am living evidence that God can totally change your conditions and outlook with a single phone call, chance meeting, or putting the right people in your life at the rght time. I am reminded of His power over and over. On my last dollar, God reversed my life. When I thought there was no way, He made a way.

Turn your problems over to God. Turn our country over to God. Turn your life over to God. He will not let you down. Find the hope He has in store for you.

I no longer worry about the future. Find Him and He will change your life.

Stuff...I do not need more stuff

Remember the crazy commentary by George Carlin about "stuff"?  Well worth listening to again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

I am paraphrasing, but he talked about our love of "stuff" and the need for more "stuff".  

George was not wrong. In fact, he was commenting in this 1986 clip about the very condition which is leading us into the "next great depression"....debt. Consumer debt...and it is at an all time high. The last 30 years of "debt based consumerism" is truly going to come home to roost soon. The signs are everywhere.

People are living pay check to pay check. If there is a single disruption in the flow of income, households fail and houses that were paid on for sometimes decades are lost. OBAMA wants businesses and consumers to spend more and is providing incentives to help us make that decision. You cannot spend your way out of a recession on debt. But he has...some 7 trillion and counting.

We have surrounded ourselves with stuff of all kinds. Good stuff, important stuff, bad stuff, stuff that made us feel good for 5 seconds after we said we would buy it. Old stuff, new stuff, mom's stuff, dad's stuff and even stuff they received from their parents and grandparents. Its not the stuff we receive free that is the problem. It is the covet we have for new stuff we need to present an image to the world that is the problem. God said "Thou shalt not covet...."

I know a man who has one plate, one set of utensil's and almost no stuff. He is a very happy person and fun to talk to. Somehow this 75 year old man has managed to be unbridled by the mass of stuff the rest of us seem to accumulate. He does not need storage buildings to hold his excess stuff and he does not need a giant house to display all his stuff. He lives in a 20 by 20 wood frame foot house that has lots of room. More room than I have in some spaces I care not to mention. Yes. I am a pack rat of sorts....but that's story for a different mental condition. Hording.

Our stuff is going to be the end of us. China is banking on us wanting more stuff. When the big one comes...and is is coming...all that stuff we have will be near worthless. Who will want that $600 treadmill to stay looking great, when there is barely enough food to eat or money to buy it. That nice dress suit will be cozy as we warm up to the fire place because we can't afford the electricity to heat our home. That expensive car will not be needed either when fuel hits $4 a gallon...or how about $5, 6 or 7. 

The point here is when things go bad, the stuff we coveted and cared for over the years will become worthless to us. It's funny how quick we mentally can go from "I always want this with me" to "You can have it for cheap."   You see it morph verbally at garage sales every weekend.

We all should look around our house and decide what is just clutter an what is real and essential to our lives. Sell off what you can now before it is worth less to buyers who learn that stuff is just that..stuff.

Garage sale anyone???

I'm fed up with all the media rhetoric about China...

I am sick and tired of all this US media rhetoric about China. China has this and China has that. China did this and China did that. It's enough to drive a "sane patriot" insane.

This love affair the media has with China has got to be stopped...

How about having a love affair with God and America? You know, God the maker our our life and our world. Or how about the greatest country on earth. The most generous, the last superpower, the one that allows its' citizens the freedom of choice, self determination, religion and speech to name a few. You won't find any of that in China. Everything I mentioned is not true in China.

According to the CIA world fact book, China has a population of 1,338,612,968 (July 2009 est.) . Last time I looked the USA has 307,212,123 (July 2009 est.) people and the "entire world" has 6,790,062,216 (July 2009 est.) people. (For those of you wondering, India has 1,156,897,766 (July 2009 est)). This means China has 1 million more people to feed then we do here in the USA.  This also means that they have an aging population that would make our "senior baby boomer issue" look like a "walk in the park".

Don't get me wrong, I am not bashing China or the Chinese. The Chinese I know ( and I know a few) are warm, friendly, generous and very courteous people. I love spending time with my friends to learn about their culture and issues. Most complain about the same issues I we face in our homes...kids, money, relationships, etc.

They want the best for their country and politically the sense is they are torn between being oppressed by Maoism Communism and this "new bread of young Chinese" that have tasted the outside world, capitalism, the Internet and like it. No wonder there is Censor-ism in China. I can hear Beijing now...What if they all could read the outside world views? They might adopt some of them. We cannot have that. It would not be controlled and aligned with our political views. It would be social change on a massive scale. Good thing 85% of the population does not have Internet access...let alone a computer.

No. I am talking about the media. They have put China on a pedestal and I think it is wrong for doing so. We Americans are ones who have caused this misalignment. We would rather go to Walmart and buy a cheap subsidized Chinese products than pay good money for a real well made American products. We shipped good paying US jobs overseas in all the millions of empty CONEX cargo box containers we received Chinese goods in. It is clearly our fault (a choice) and we should look in the mirror. One reason China can buy our debt is they are naturally thrifty people. They had nothing, so everything is precious. We have it all, so it appears nothing is precious...except more debt to show John or Sally that we can have it too.

Same thing with the Saudi's. Our love of oil and the flow of funds to buy that oil, transfered our wealth to a foreign power. Incredible wealth. Trillions upon trillions of US dollars. We loved our cars and the Saudi's loved our money. We thought we were helping a US oil major...the Saudi's ended up with most of our gasoline funds.

This world is not about free trade...it is about money, protectionism, trade deals, public opinion and political power. Instead of focusing on what is important, the mainstream media chooses to publish mush. The media have lost their proverbial compass. They threw away their sense of truth for a mock version of it, fed by all night streaming media feeds from slanted sources. Then to hold China out as some model we need to look up to...I think not. Not for this cowboy.  I will take freedom over wealth any day.   

Let's ask the media to run 5 stories about God and American Freedoms for ever story they show about China.



 

Relay: The Economic State Of The Union 2010: What Replaces The Deby-Driven Economy?

http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0126/McMillion.html

The Economic State Of The Union 2010: What Replaces The Deby-Driven Economy?


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By Charles McMillion

cwm@mbginfosvcs.com

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The last two difficult years could be a mild warning for the future as the internal, cost-cutting logic of lifeboat ethics and the economic race to the bottom accelerate hardship while governance disintegrates further and the concentration of private wealth and power soars.



Over the past decade of concentrating wealth and power, the United States lost 1.5 million private-sector jobs; incomes, private investment and industrial production all fell; and "average" real net worth per capita plunged by about 10 percent.



While Wall Street partied with record bonuses and taxpayer bailouts, for almost everyone else it was a lost decade unprecedented since the 1930s.



More ominous still is the fact that to achieve even these awful results households and the federal government each were forced to more than double all previous debt in history, adding almost $14 trillion in new debt.



That is, since 1999 households and the federal government, through new mortgages, credit-card debt, school and medical debt, tax cuts and war spending borrowed three dollars (net) for every one dollar of expanded Gross Domestic Product. Since 1980, debt has grown more than twice as much as GDP. The United States borrowed its entire past generation of sluggish growth...twice.



It was, indeed, an economic miracle that debt could soar so high for so long.



While the "bubble" jobs and asset values now are gone, the debts and their unprecedented leverage remain and are worsening rapidly. The ratio of household and federal debt to GDP peaked at 139 percent just after WW-II and fell thereafter to 79 percent in 1981. Since then, as attacks on governance intensified, debt rocketed to 131 percent of GDP in 1999, 171 percent in September 2008 and over 185 percent today.



For the past generation of accelerating globalization the financial sector's lock on policymakers has reversed previous surpluses and forced the United States to import and borrow massively (paying them hefty fees) rather than to produce and earn. Over this time, the full U.S. current account trade deficits totaled -$7.8 trillion. That is, the United States produced -$7.8 trillion less than it spent since 1981, borrowing and selling off assets to China and other foreign interests to pay for it.



Constant false media "reporting" notwithstanding, only trade deficits -- NOT federal budget deficits, no matter how large -- require offsetting foreign borrowing. (China, too, has government deficits.)



Worsening sharply each decade, U.S. trade losses totaled -$5.8 trillion over just the past 10 years -- far more than total GDP growth. The U.S. manufacturing sector lost almost one-in-three of its jobs, the worst decade in history, as manufacturers' production declined over the decade for the first time since the 1930s. Every manufacturing industry slashed jobs, with durable manufacturing losing 34.4 percent of its jobs.



Over the past decade, the auto industry suffered -$2.1 trillion of imports and -$1.2 trillion of net imports and production shortfalls. Of course, even this understates the effects of imports as the industry made substantial wage and benefit concessions, received aid and tax concessions from state and federal programs and cut corners on health, safety, environmental and other regulatory costs trying to compete with imports. That was even before bankruptcy filings and the massive taxpayer bailouts. The once mighty U.S. industry lost over 50 percent of its jobs in the decade.



The Obama administration's recent "Manufacturing Framework" does not have a single mention of the word "import," and "trade deficit" is mentioned only vaguely with no actual figures either of its size or composition.



China is now the world's leading auto producer. With the help of all the major global automakers pouring their best expertise, including R&D, into minority joint-ventures with China's state-owned giants, China is setting the standards for next-generation alternative energy vehicles. Now majority owned by American taxpayers, General Motors is still closing productive capacity in the United States -- giving-up U.S. exports -- as it opens new plants and R&D centers in China to help the exports of its majority Chinese partners.



Every industry is different but all face the same mindless U.S. "free" global trade policies and all are on the same path to China and elsewhere. Textile/apparel manufacturers lost 63 percent of their jobs over the past decade. U.S.-based producers of computer equipment lost 49 percent of their jobs; telecom equipment makers lost 46 percent; semiconductor producers lost 43 percent of their jobs.



China now has the world's largest and most profitable banks, insurance companies, telecom and Internet providers. It has lured all the world's leading financial and tech firms to produce in China, usually with Chinese partners that are quickly becoming serious competitors. Google is only the latest prominent firm to find it cannot compete alone against both a western-nourished Chinese rival and Chinese authorities determined to build "independent" innovation and capacity.



For the first time on record, the United States became a global net importer of Advanced Technology Products in 2002 and these high-tech deficits have offset all net earnings on "intellectual property" royalties and fees -- including franchise fees for Starbucks, McDonalds, etc. -- for the past seven years. That is, since 2003 the U.S. global balance on technology goods AND services trade has been virtually zero, offsetting no part of U.S. losses for autos and other manufactured goods, oil and gas or anything else.



China alone has a technology goods and services surplus with the United States of about $70 billion per year and it is worsening rapidly. The $2.4-trillion war chest of foreign currencies created by China's trade surpluses and other activities already generates six times as much for China's politically powerful U.S. investments -- currently mostly low-yielding U.S. Treasury bonds -- as all earnings of U.S.-incorporated companies and investors in China.



The broad, once incomparable and dynamic U.S. supply chain of manufactured goods and services has been hollowed out and continues to shift quickly to China and elsewhere. It is this vital supply chain decline, rather than concerns about any single product or group of products -- for which substitutes may or may not be readily available -- that is the most urgent challenge to U.S. economic and military security.



While the United States lost 1.5-million private-sector jobs over the past decade, the healthcare and education bureaucracies added 4.5 million jobs, and bars and restaurants added another 1.4 million. That is, but for these generally low-paying, low productivity industries that remain almost entirely protected from imports or offshore outsourcing, the U.S. lost almost 7.5 million jobs over the decade. The only higher-wage industry that added jobs was professional and technical services, which added 1.2 million jobs, mostly related to the unsustainable burst of federal deficit spending on foreign wars and homeland security.



The facts are clear: for 30 years U.S. jobs that are lost to imports do not move automatically to higher wage, more productive employment. In fact they generally don't get re-employed at all except through massive new borrowing by households and government. Even with unprecedented borrowing most re-employment moves down sharply to far less productive, lower wage employment that do not face imports and cannot export. Most U.S. economic destruction is not "creative" but simply and mindlessly destructive. Poorly regulated global commerce now undermines productivity and requires soaring debt to maintain much less to improve U.S. living standards.



After a lost decade and a generation built on soaring debt, large majorities of citizens are again -- or still -- demanding fundamental change beyond the failed race-to-the-bottom scam of tax cuts and deregulation. Dozens of competing small groups are again drafting economic strategies to rebuild U.S. productive capacity, stop soaring debt and sustain our remarkable living standard. None, however, comes remotely close to addressing the monumental scale of the crisis and none has the political muscle to stand up to the hirelings in the professions and in politics.



President Obama recently claimed that the wealthy and powerful Wall Street and China crowd "just doesn't get it." But as China adds almost $40 billion each month to its massive reserves and taxpayer bailed-out Goldman Sachs alone hands out $16.2 billion in "constrained" annual bonuses -- with the political power money entails -- why change?



Perhaps it is the President who really doesn't "get it." Or perhaps, like virtually every Wall Street-connected multimillionaire member of his senior staff, every Congressional Republican and most Democrats, he does "get it" but will not -- or most troubling, cannot -- change the disastrous U.S. policy direction.





-- Charles W. McMillion, president and chief economist for MBG Information Services, is a former Contributing Editor of the Harvard Business Review. He helped create the bipartisan U.S. Congressional Competitiveness Caucus a generation ago.